The Italian memoirist Primo Levi, who survived a concentration camp and then navigated his way through a blasted Germany to his native Turin, often remarked that among the most fatal qualities of the camp was its ability to erase the idea of a life outside and beyond itself. A person’s past and his present were annihilated as a matter of course—to be in the camps was to abnegate history, identity, and personality—but it was the erasure of the future that was the most chilling. With that annihilation, Levi wrote, came a moral and spiritual death that perpetuated the status quo of imprisonment.
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